For the world, 1945 was year zero

At the end of World War II, both winners and losers called for social changes of age - size. Their dreams come true?

World War II was one of the greatest events in human history. Between 1937 and 1945, more than 100 million men and women were mobilized to the armed forces across the globe, accounting for hundreds of millions of civilians involved in the conflict as workers, prisoners, slaves, and targets. Every corner of the planet, even the most remote of its fronts, was involved in this inhuman catastrophe. So the question is, In what way has this shared experience affected us after it was completed? Of course it has created a common mentality for all: how did it manifest itself? Or, rather, how has the memory of World War II changed the world? Often, the moment of the end of the war is strongly remembered. Celebrated in London and Paris in V E Day (Vyctory over Japan Day, Day of Victory in Europe, May 8, 1945) and VJ Day (Victory over Japan Day, Victory Day on Japan, August 15, 1945), as fireworks broke out in the skies over the Kremlin, and in Times Square in New York, sailors kissed nurses. The American President Truman repeated many times to his people that they were “on the threshold of a new world” and that after the death of a world at “a world at war” a peaceful “world “would be born. On August 16, 1945, the next day of Japanese surrender, Truman announced that what he was assisting was a “new beginning for Earth's history of freedom”. But as authentic as they expressed themselves, these feelings represent a very partial vision of the emotional wave that accompanied the end of the war. In addition to joy and celebrations, there were reactions of all kinds: On many parts of the globe, predominate emotions in 1945 were shame and anger. In Western Europe the appearance of the brick - headed woman who had given her body to the enemy became a powerful symbol of collocationism and against the collocationists, both in Europe and Asia, a violent wave of revenge broke out. In many of the most devastated areas, especially in the possible countries, people were handed over to despair, what war correspondent Janet Flannener called “the existence of complete physical defeat”. But even in the winning countries the feelings were not as clear and cut as it is customary to remember today: “I only experienced a strange sense of loss”, recalled John MacAuslan, former British intelligence official. Everything I had known for so long had just disappeared and seemed to have nothing to replace... Everything was gone” That is, it is correct to state that the memory of 1945 as the dawn of a new era of hope is certainly partial, despite the very heart of the postwar mentality. The motive of continuing should be partly sought in the fact that it is thus the time communication tools presented the end of the conflict, very much everywhere. Those who led the choir were the United States, undisputed war winners who in 1945 had the Navy and the planet's largest aviation and an army with which only Soviet could rival. Besides being at that moment the only nuclear power in the world. The conflict had also enriched them less: between 1939 and 1945 the American economy had almost doubled in volume and at the end of the conflict represented slightly half of GDP and the whole world. When public figures in America announced the beginning of what was beginning to be called the U.S. “is not that they were just saying: they were also trying to approach the great new responsibility their country was charged with. In a single blow, the United States saw itself becoming the police officer of the human race, the sponsor of the vote, and the closest representative to a good Samaritan that our planet had ever had: in light of this, it is no wonder that Americans would want to convince both the car and others that the world would become a better place because of their efforts.

A Red Wave The next major winner of the conflict was the Soviet Union and, as a result, the Communist Party. Communists had always dreamed of the revolution, and the second war had served them on a silver plate. Until the fall of the Iron West, in Eastern Europe it has continued to commemorate the end of this war as a “one of the greatest events in human history, which has dealt a deadly blow to capitalism” (in the words of Albanian Defence Minister Prokop Murra in 1985). It is out of the question that, thanks to the war communism experienced a tremendous increase in popularity -- in three years from the end of the conflict, more than 900000 French, over 1 million Romanians, 1 million and 4,000 thousand Czechs and 2 million and 200 thousand Italians. A similar situation was confirmed in China (where the Communists would shortly later take power), Latin America (where party memberships increased between 1939 and 1947), and the Soviet Union itself (where the party rose by almost 50% between 1941 and 1945, despite all the losses caused by war). As the Lithuanian philosopher Emmanuel Levinas commented in the years '50s, the exponential growth of communism in that period “na learned to feel in the advance of this movement the steps of Fatt” itself. It is possible that the voices that called for the arrival of a new “excellent worlds” were raised more strongly by countries that had suffered the greatest disasters. The governments of most of Europe could not allow feelings of anger or despair: their task now was to take control of the respective countries, establish stability and rebuild. Police forces were cleared across the continent, militia forces were arrested, and processes were launched, but there was also a need to offer populations any hope of counterbalancing anger and demoralisation: so it is not an act of wonder whether in France Charles de Gaulle promised that “would begin the journey to rescue”, if in Yugoslavia Marshall Tito offered the wonderful <x8vision of a new life” made up of the <x10m display> and if the Great Britain government promised to create <x12). In turn, even potential countries had to resist temptation to submit to despair. In Germany, 1945 was declared “Viti Zero”, not only to show that the bombings had taken the country to the Stone Age but also to express the hope that the German people would be allowed to start over. Meanwhile, Japan repeated to itself and all over the world that it had reborn in the nuclear flames of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a famous discussion, the survivor of the Takashi Nagai atomic bomb presented his hometown as a martyr who had given his life not only to Japan, but to the whole world: “We should be grateful that Nagasaki has been chosen for this Holocaust”, he said in November 1945. We should be grateful that through his sacrifice, the world could have peace”.

Thirsty for Change Even countries kept away from effective violence were affected by the revolutionary atmosphere and the postwar rebirth. Latin America was swallowed up by a wave of democracy: military dictatorships began falling one by one like the shed in Ecuador, Venezuela, Guatemala, Bolivia, and Peru held its first free election of history in 1945. “Vit 1944 and 1945” refer to an annual report published shortly after the end of the conflict, “have led to more democratic changes in various Latin American countries than each year since the XIX century's struggle for independence”. And much of Asia was seized by an incredible thirst for change. Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru often pointed to World War II as one of the main factors for his country's rebirth as an independent state: “We just got out of that fight, and people already speak in loud and random terms about other wars to come”, the Indian Parliament said in December 1946. And it's at the moment that New India is being born, vital and deprived of the” fears. The future Indonesian president arrived at the moment to thank Sky for the recent years of violence that had enabled the birth of a free Indonesia “forged into the fire of war”. So in these places and many others in Asia and Africa, 1945 was truly presented as the dawn of a new era. The whole world adopted this idealism and radical change because it came to almost everyone - in a short time, any large - scale project began to be presented as the vision of an ideal future. Supporters of centralised planning spoke with enthusiastic tones to nation industries, collectiveise agriculture, regulate financial systems and organise societies pending a more equal division of prosperity, health and education. And it wasn't only the Socialists that you're proposing these scenarios, it's also Christian Democrats, in Europe, as well as Asia, Africa and Latin America. “Planification is becoming an almost universal phenomenon”, Austrian sociologist Otto Neurath wrote during the exile war. “Planification as a war measure, planning as a drug against economic depression, planning as a pleasure for architects and as a new fundamental feature of our society” Among the most enthusiastic visionarys were urban designers who took office to be reborn by the ruins of European cities. In 1945 the architects often spoke without any irony of destruction as a good “” and looked at cities like Coventry, Hamburg and Warsaw, as rise up to the sky as the fenics from their ashes, more beautiful, more modern, in a better word than those full of degradation that were destroyed in conflict. In Great Britain whose enthusiasm for reconstruction reached such heights that it aroused the secret envy of American colleagues: “if all of this is the work of Blitz”, the American autobilian expert Catherine Bauer, then explains why so liberal in the United States secretly cultivates anger and has not been able to experience this experience in the first place in 1944. For others, the salvation of mankind would come from science: The technological wonders born during the war especially the invention of nuclear energy proved to be an effect that is hard to imagine today. Reporters like Gerald Wendt of the Times began to speculate about a future in which “science would free the human race not only from famine, sickness, and premature deaths but also from poverty and the very need of the worker”. Worldwide, fictional accounts “masks of nuclear power” and “energy extracts” began to circulate. A magazine from Berlin predicted the arrival of a space device able to transport people to the moon for 3 hours and 27 minutes, while “Illustled Weekly of India” in 1946 published introductory vision that would cover the distance between Bombay and Calcutta in almost 1 hour, along with illustrations of desert transformed into oasis and North Poles transformed into a tourist country.

The Birth of Great Institutions The biggest project of all possible globalisation. Starting with the co-operation of allied countries during the war, dozens of new institutions were established at the end of the war. It took a three-week conference at the American resort of Bretton Woods in the spring of 1944 to create both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank: simply the fact that so many countries (44 total) managed to agree to a complete review of the planet's financial system in such a short time and to testify very well how important each of them would have seemed to form an integrated and adjusted global economy. A year later, when the end of the war was in sight, the United Nations was established in San Francisco, followed by numerous other institutions: Organization of the United States, European Community, NATO, the Warsaw Treaty, the Movement of the Non-Aligned, GATT and many others, on an apparently endless list. The grand projects were in the order of the day and signed international agreements on anything, from aviation to global mail systems, while the World Health Organization launched a series of planetary campaigns to eliminate the world's <x0-second suicides, like tuberculosis, leaving and malaria. In almost the totality of cases, these institutions were presented as organisation of “born from the flames of World War II”: The United Nations itself has a huge phenics rising from the flames of war painted on a wall in the Security Council hall. That is, despite conflicting feelings caused by World War II, in 1945 people from all parts of the world had the yoke to embrace these ideas but also those that did not yet make themselves willing to live with them. We can't go back to the economic and social structure of 1939 even if we wanted” bitterly wrote British ultraconservative historian Arthur Bryant, “because this system no longer exists”. And many modern historians agree: “Bota could not have been the same after the war”, says Ian Buruma. There were many things going on. A lot has changed. Despite that, there was much follow - up. Beyond the rhetoric regarding the cleansing of Europe's institutions by fascists and collateralists, post-war governments had no special success: for example, the post-war German civil service was full of former Nazis, including characters who had been responsible for massacres and atrocities such as Wilhelm Hauser, the head of Renani police with Palat. Throughout Europe, the economic needs of reconstruction passed before those of justice -- since 1946 almost everywhere, the processes against the conglomerates were stopped without much fuss, and many of those arrested were amnistered. It's actually on these foundations that the economic miracle of the years, "50." The same was true in Japan, where none of the country's industrial leaders ever saw a courtroom, despite war crimes that had been tarnished. As a result, their responsibility in the events of war was never faced in open terms, and today, in the 20th century, companies such as Mitsubishi, Mitsui and Nippon Steel were found involved in legal matters for alleged actions belonging to World War II, writes World War II.

Anger, shame, fear Moreover, the new global institutions were not then as young as they wanted to appear: The United Nations itself was a little different from a reeditation of the League of Nations, from which they had inherited much of its personnel, statutes, and agencies (for example, the World Labour Organization). In 1945 the purest idealists viewed the United Nations, not as an expression of postwar hopes, but as a betrayal of them. There is no first step towards a world government “, journalist Emery Reves wrote in 1945. “The world government is first step”. The most fascinating among the “bubbles” of the post-war period didn't take much to crack. Atomic scientists such as Otto Frisch suggested that dreams like that of nuclear power cars were actually unalable: “would be enough minutes in a machine of this kind to kill”. Then, in the '60s, belief in urban planning died, when writers such as Jane Jacobs and Oscar Newman described how these projects had ended up unwittingly creating diplomatic cities with antisocial approaches. And in the '80s many great centralization projects, like the statehood of industries, all were reversed, while politicians like Ronald Reagan began to think that “government doesn't solve problems: subvention”. Today, many international projects born in 1945 have begun to explode, the first of the entire global financial system established in Bretton Woods, collusioned since the years of the United States' withdrawal from the gold system. The United Nations still resists, with its underpants, though for days and more ignored by the same places that are permanent members of their Security Council. Until the European Union, perhaps the most successful international institution “, born from the flames of World War II”, has recently begun to waver. In our time, feelings related to war are not typical of postwar thinking - idealism, community feeling, trust in experts and institutions. If we want to give the headlines all over the world, today's feelings are actually the ones that in 1945 attempted to be printed - anger, shame, fear.